When singer and guitarist Cara Brindisi gigs at venues like Vincent's or Funky Murphy's, she's enjoying herself, playing the songs she likes, entertaining the audience, going wherever the music leads her.

On stage, it's all about the performance.

But when she's playing in someone's home or a hospice facility, Brindisi is part of a team of clinicians following a plan to meet someone's physical, emotional, spiritual or cognitive needs.

At her day job, it's all about the patient.

Brindisi is a certified music therapist who works for VNA Care Network & Hospice. To earn that certification, she went to the Berklee College of Music for four years, did a six-month internship and took a three- to four-hour exam that put her education and experience to the test.

Despite the popular perception, Brindisi says, being a music therapist isn't showing up at a nursing home, strapping on the guitar and playing “Kumbaya.”

“It goes far beyond just being a human jukebox,” she said.

Brindisi, 24, who lives in Worcester, grew up in Shrewsbury and went to Shrewsbury High School. Always a singer, she knew she wanted a career in music and decided on the intense music therapy program at Berklee, where the course load was 60 percent science, psychology and anatomy and 40 percent music.

Her own performances grew out of the repertoire she developed in school and at her internship.

“Now that I know how to play all of these songs,” she said, she told herself, “I might as well give it a shot and make a few extra bucks and play in a coffee shop or a restaurant corner.”

She performs mostly cover tunes, putting her own twist on songs ranging from the late 1800s folk song “Red River Valley” to Neil Young's “Old Man” of the 1970s to more contemporary music.

“It's just music that's recognizable and something that I like to sing,” she said.

That's not the case when she's working as a therapist, and the music is “evidence based, science based and goal oriented,” said Brindisi, who works with doctors, nurses and social workers to come up with a treatment plan for each patient.

“It's an array of goals and objectives that are set that become my therapeutic intention when I'm using music,” she said.

She gave two examples of how she might work with patients, or patients and their families.

If someone was experiencing rapid breathing and a quick heart rate after exerting himself or undergoing a stressful test, Brindisi might play at a cadence that matches the rise and fall of the patient's chest, gradually slowing things down to ease the patient out of his anxious state.

Simply playing slowly would not get the job done.

“Even though music is magical, it's not magic,” she said. “It's just not that quick.”

To help a family and an aware but non-verbal woman who was dying of cancer, Brindisi said she played guitar in the background while relatives surrounded the patient and described something that they loved about her or wished for her. Using their words and emotions, Brindisi then crafted a song that was recorded for the family.

VNA Care Network & Hospice began its music therapy program last year, when the agency hired Brindisi.

“We have experience offering other complementary therapies, including massage and Reiki, and music therapy was a natural next step in expanding those services,” Patricia M. Kennedy, director of hospice for the network, said in an email. “The response from patients and families has been phenomenal.”

Brindisi has gotten a lot from the experience, as well.

“I get to meet the coolest, most beautiful people in our communities,” she said, often “in the places where they raised their children.”

“Really, in hospice, to me, no one has passed away. They might be gone, but everything that they've been able to teach me is going on to the next person,” she said.

“I'm so blessed and so honored and so privileged to be part of that connective, part of that human process,” Brindisi said. “I can't think of anything better.”

That feeling is something they can't teach at Berklee — or anywhere else.